ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) provides a framework of
Best Practice
guidance for IT Service Management and since its
creation, ITIL has grown to
become the most widely accepted approach to IT Service
Management in the
world.
The challenges for IT managers are to co-ordinate and
work in partnership with
the business to deliver high quality IT services. This
has to be achieved while
adopting a more business and customer oriented approach
to delivering
services and cost optimization.
The primary objective of Service Management is to ensure
that the IT services
are aligned to the business needs and actively support
them. It is imperative
that the IT services underpin the business processes, but
it is also increasingly
important that IT acts as an agent for change to
facilitate business
transformation.
To understand what service management is, we need to
understand what
services are, and how service management can help service
providers to deliver
and manage these services.
A service is a means of delivering
value to customers by
facilitating outcomes customers want
to achieve without the
ownership of specific costs and risks.
A simple example of a customer outcome that could be
facilitated by an IT
service might be: “Sales people spending more time
interacting with
customers” facilitated by “a remote access service that
enables reliable access
to corporate sales systems from sales people’s laptops”.
The outcomes that customers want to achieve are the
reason why they purchase
or use the service. The value of the service to the
customer is directly dependent
on how well it facilitates these outcomes. Service
management is what enables
a service provider to understand the services they are
providing, to ensure that
the services really do facilitate the outcomes their
customers want to achieve, to
understand the value of the services to their customers,
and to understand and
manage all of the costs and risks associated with those
services.
Service Management is a set of
specialized organizational
capabilities for providing value to
customers in the form of
services.
These “specialized organizational capabilities” are
described in this pocket
guide. They include all of the processes, methods,
functions, roles and activities
that a Service Provider uses to enable them to deliver
services to their
customers.
Service management is concerned with more than just
delivering services. Each
service, process or infrastructure component has a
lifecycle, and service
management considers the entire lifecycle from strategy
through design and
transition to
operation and continual improvement.
The outcomes that customers want to achieve are the
reason why they purchase
or use the service. The value of the service to the
customer is directly dependent
on how well it facilitates these outcomes. Service
management is what enables
a service
provider to understand the services they are providing
Service Management is a set of
specialized organizational
capabilities for providing value to
customers in the form of
services.
Effective service management is itself a strategic asset
of the service provider,
providing them with the ability to carry out their core
business of providing
services that deliver value to customers by facilitating
the outcomes customers
want to
achieve.
ITIL was published between 1989 and 1995 by Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office
(HMSO) in the UK on behalf of the Central Communications
and
Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) – now subsumed within
the Office of
Government Commerce (OGC). Its early use was principally
confined to the
UK and Netherlands. A second version of ITIL was
published as a set of
revised books
between 2000 and 2004.
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